System is grinding to a halt

Hi

I'm using a G5 1.8GHZ with 10.3.9 and 256MB of RAM. It's a couple of years old now. Has been fantastic but with 3000 photos loaded and home movies, garage band creations etc etc. it's now starting to run really slow. IPhoto is so slow it's pretty much out of commission.

ANy suggestions? Do I have to get content off the hard drive? Do I need to buy more RAM to operate IPhoto with that many photos? Don't want to rush out and buy a load of stuff only to find the problem remains. Thanks for any advice.

One thing I will tell you for sure, 256-Megs RAM is not enough for all you are doing with your machine. Upgrade to 1GB at least and I think you will see a large improvement. The larger the photo and music collections grow, the slower iPhoto for one runs as it's taking more and more RAM to load it all.

Also you might want to grab ONYX and run all the maintenance options (Chron Scripts, Permission Repair and Complete System Optimization.

Also, how much free space you have on your main hard drive?

Hi. Looks like I've got 55GB left

With that much space left, just put in as much RAM as you can. It really does make all the difference.

OK. RAM it is. Thanks for advice

Here are some helpful iPhoto tips for when your photo library becomes a bit bloated:

Slim Down iPhoto

Speed up iPhoto

iPhoto Browser

I have exactly the same machine with the same OS. It came with 256, which was awful. I put another 1gb in and it really perked the machine up.

This doesn't entirely explain why yours has gradually slowed - mine was a dog right out of the box, but anyway you do need to get some more RAM.

jonnyd said:

I have exactly the same machine with the same OS. It came with 256, which was awful. I put another 1gb in and it really perked the machine up.

This doesn't entirely explain why yours has gradually slowed - mine was a dog right out of the box, but anyway you do need to get some more RAM.

Click to expand...

My original Mac Mini 1.25Ghz came with 256Megs RAM. It was very slow. Open Safari, Mail and iTunes and iTunes would skip! Put in 512 that night and all the problems went away. 256 Megs just is not enough. Apple learned that lesson finally!

I entirely agree with those that say RAM is definitely insufficient in your case. Add some, you'll have the impression you just gave yourself a new Mac.

Am I right to think that I need to buy 2 identical sticks of memory to upgrade ram? Can't just buy 1 and drop it in?

okay so - a google search got me to this forum - since my OSX Tiger is running really really slow. I found a page (in this forum) that recommended I restart holding down apple and "S" key. Wow! that got me into the programming - so I typed (again per advice) "fsck -fy" and after a time my system came back and said volume check failed local host:/root# (4,33045). I tried this several time with the same result. I'm a pretty savvy Mac User but no programmer - can someone help? I tried of course, restarting from OSX cd and it could nbot repair my hard drive. Please help/advise. Thanks

Try booting from the install disk and running Disk Utility from the menu.
Also, as said above, try running Onyx.

cradom said:

Try booting from the install disk and running Disk Utility from the menu.
Also, as said above, try running Onyx.

Click to expand...

I have Onyx mounted and running - already tried rebooting from cd (see post) and that only resulted in "could not complete" type error message
I'm thinking of purchasing Disk Warrior - don't know what else to do...